There was nothing in it but an automatic gun, with an empty clip nearby, and a copy of Il Denaro. She stared at the date: four days ago. She picked it up and unfolded the paper.

Several yellowed manuscript papers fluttered to the bed. Where better for a man like Faust to hide a priceless Mozart manuscript than in plain sight, bundled in the financial news?

She carefully gathered the pages. Back at La Musica, when she had first seen the manuscript, she hadn’t had time to really look at it. But now everything registered. The black scratchings were unmistakable. The fine strokes of faded ink. The distinctive signature. And finally, in the left corner very small: no. 28.

Her heart began to beat fast. She knew there were only twenty-seven catalogued Mozart piano concertos. Many of the originals that had resurfaced after the war were now housed in the Jagiellonska Library in Krakow.

Where had this one come from?

And was it the reason her uncle was dead?

She took the manuscript back to the piano. She sat down, carefully setting the fragile papers before her. She began to play.

The first movement opened with throbbing D minor chords. She had to go slowly, the technical demands way beyond her skills. Her heart was pounding with excitement as she grasped that she might be the first in centuries to play this.

She was sweating by the time she reached the end of the first movement. She stopped suddenly.

My God. A cadenza.

She stared at the notes. Her father had taught her that Mozart himself often injected cadenzas—improvised virtuoso solos—into his music. But he never wrote them down. Modern performers usually filled the gaps with their own improvisations that tried to mimic the master’s intent.

She began to play the cadenza. But her ears began to pick up strange discordant sounds. Odd little dissonances and patterns. She could suddenly hear her father’s voice speaking to her from behind as she practiced.

With Mozart, my dear, with music so pure, the slightest error stands out as an unmistakable blemish.

Kaminski stopped, her fingers poised over the keys.

There was something very strange about this cadenza.

The restaurant was almost empty. Two waiters stood at discreet attention just beyond a red curtain. Middleton could see from their faces they wanted to go home.

Yet Faust seemed in no hurry to go anywhere.

“So you never suspected anything about the Chopin?” Faust asked.

Middleton wasn’t sure how much to tell him. He still didn’t trust the man.

He thought suddenly about his interrupted ride to Baltimore with the two dopers Traci and Marcus. How he had made them listen to a Schoenberg recitatif, and Marcus’s crack that it sounded like nothing but wrong notes.

All the easier to hid a message in, he had told Marcus.

How hard could it be then to encrypt a code within the mathematical beauty of Chopin?